Former President Donald Trump received bad news in one of his federal criminal cases while appearing at a Manhattan courthouse for a different civil lawsuit on Tuesday.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected an appeal from X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday that asked the court to rehear the matter of a search warrant that was granted to Special Counsel Jack Smith so he could access Trump’s Twitter feed as part of the federal election interference case.
The existence of the warrant, which was granted January 2022, was first made public in August after a court filing revealed that the social media platform initially resisted turning over access, leading to a $350,000 fine. The Justice Department also obtained a nondisclosure that prevented X from informing Trump of the search. It remains unclear what Smith was seeking from the account, but Trump did use Twitter in the days leading up to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The former president was banned from the platform days after the attack after Twitter found his tweets violated their terms. His access was restored when Elon Musk took over, but Trump has not returned to the platform.
Newsweek reached out to Trump via email for comment.
Trump was in court for another case in Manhattan as the latest development in the federal case unfolded. The former president was in court as the second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial began Tuesday.
In a separate trial last year, a jury determined that Trump was liable for sexually assaulting Carroll in a dressing room in the 1990s. The current trial will determine whether he will have to pay the columnist additional damages for defaming her when he denied her allegations as “a Hoax and a lie” in 2019 and stated, “This woman is not my type!” Trump has denied all wrongdoing.
Although the order from the federal appeals court was bad news for Trump, four of the court’s conservatives raised issues with the fact that the search warrant could possibly grant the Justice Department private materials, like direct messages, that Trump was not afforded the opportunity to invoke executive privilege over.
“In every case involving access to presidential communications, the President has been able to litigate claims of executive privilege, or the court has denied access to the materials. I can find no precedent for what occurred here, namely the court-ordered disclosure of presidential communications without notice to the President and without any adjudication of executive privilege,” Judge Neomi Rao, a Trump appointee, wrote.
Rao said that while Smith rebutted Twitter’s efforts to raise concerns that Trump would have any confidential information in his messages, “it is widely known that President Trump used his Twitter account to conduct official business.”
Former President Donald Trump sits in the courtroom during his civil fraud trial at New York Supreme Court on January 11, 2024, in New York City. A federal appeals court denied an appeal to revisit the search warrant granted to Special Counsel Jack Smith.
Seth Wenig/Getty Images
“Under longstanding precedent, however, the Special Counsel should not have been allowed to evade an assertion of presidential privilege simply by issuing the warrant to a third party—’it is, after all, the President’s information,'” she said.
Rao was joined in her opinion by Judges Karen LeCraft Henderson, Gregory Katsas and Justin Walker. Katsas and Walker were both appointed by Trump, and Henderson was appointed by George H.W. Bush.
The latest court order also comes on the heels of Trump’s victory in Iowa, where he won in a landslide on Monday night with 51 percent of the Republican vote. His closest competitor, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, trailed Trump by nearly 30 percentage points.
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